Unlock the Power of Flow
Stop fighting for focus and focus on flow
When did you last lose track of time?
Think back to the last time you spent hours immersed in something, immune to distractions, oblivious to buzzing phones, nearby chatter, and the siren call of the fridge.
Popular examples might be playing music, gaming, or a long run. What was it about that task that sent you into a deep sense of focus?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the founders of the positive psychology movement in the 1980s calls this “flow state”. It describes the way the brain changes in this state to stop us procrastinating and keep us productive.
What if the secret to productivity in contexts where we don’t naturally lose ourselves to distractions was not to tell ourselves over and over to “stop procrastinating” but to engineer a flow state?
As psychologist Carl Jung says: “what you resist not only persists, but will grow in size”. Telling ourselves to “be more productive” or wishing we were more focused will only lead us further down the path of procrastination.
This article explores how we can learn from the way we experience our natural flow states and engineer flow states in less enjoyable situations when we need to.
How can flow states help us?
Psychologists who have studied people experiencing a flow state have uncovered numerous benefits. Fritz and Avsec found the flow state of music students was a reliable predictor of emotional wellbeing. Mills and Fullagar found that flow was also the key to motivation, with highly motivated learners experiencing higher levels of flow.
What’s more, flow states are ‘addictive’. In 2002, Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi interviewed rock climbers, chess players, athletes, and artists who spent many hours in flow states. They found people were willing to go to great lengths to repeat the experience again and again.
Flow is a workout for our brain, keeping it healthy and engaged in life-long learning.
What’s more, if we learn how to engineer it and apply it to daily tasks, we can achieve more by exerting less effort.
What exactly does a flow state feel like for you?
Studies on flow state describe seven universal signs that show up each time.
Focus: we feel completely absorbed in the task at hand.
Enjoyment: we’re engaged and exhilarated by what we’re doing.
Clarity: goals are clear and progress is immediately visible
Challenge: we are challenged enough to prevent boredom but not so much that we feel anxious
Confidence: self-doubt and self-consciousness vanish in a flow state, we feel in control of the task
Timelessness: we become unaware of time passing and we lose track of our biological needs such as food and sleep
Motivation: we’re motivated by the task for its own sake. If there was no reward, but you were in a flow state, you’d be doing it anyway.
Some of these may show up stronger than others for you. Think back to the flow state you recalled at the beginning — which signs show up the most and why?
How else did you feel in that moment?
- What circumstances were you in?
- What did you eat before or after?
- What broke the flow state?
- How long did it last?
- Where was your phone?
How can we engineer a flow state?
It might be ambitious to reach a flow state in our daily work that’s as all-consuming as the flow states rock climbers or artists experience. There are more distractions and our roles may be less passion-driven.
But there are benefits to being able to take even a small amount of the flow state we might experience when immersed in one of our passions into a professional context — even if we’re not holding focus for hours at a time without thinking about lunch.
According to Jo Nash, PhD, the first step is to experience a flow state as often as we can, no matter what we’re doing. She explains that “regular experiences of flow lead to a greater sense of fulfilment and enhance [our] capacity to experience flow more often.”
Once we’ve repeatedly experienced that feeling of focus and engagement in a leisure context, it will be easier to replicate in a professional context.
But how do we keep the same flow state when we go from piano to powerpoint? Once the activity changes completely, it’s all about shifting our circumstances.
Change your Circumstances
Look back at the flow state signs you considered earlier — which of these could you aid by managing your circumstances? Reducing the number of notifications you receive (apps, messages, emails) is a simple example of how this could help.
But what other circumstances can you shift? Perhaps it will help to manage the lighting or temperature in your workspace, to shuffle your agenda to release a block of time or to take some deep breaths to clear your mind.
Once you start your task, how can you make sure progress is immediately visible? It might be by designing small, manageable goals or by shifting expectations.
When you achieve a flow state at work, take note and analyse the situation. What was driving that flow? Was it the task, your mood, the particular set up of your space or a combination of all of them? Find what works and make it a repeatable formula.
What if it’s not working?
Imagine you’ve adapted your circumstances and found focus time in your calendar. You sit down at your laptop to work and… nothing happens. Call it “writer’s block” or procrastination, it doesn’t feel great — however and whenever it shows up.
What we resist persists. The best thing to do (and often the last thing we feel we should do) is to take a break. Not one of those “let me give in to procrastination and go on social media” breaks, but a real break away from our desks to clear our messy minds.
Once we’ve taken a short pause, we can come back with a clear mind and identify the blockers in our way. Which of the signs of flow is blocked? Is the goal too big? Do we need a change of scene? Is the progress not visible?
In response, we might need to introduce some creative constraints:
- Chunk up the task
- Set clearer goals and time constraints
- Get specific about what good looks like
- Start with the simplest, smallest part
My last resort is always to take the first step. This might be as small as adding the first bullet point or writing the first sentence, then the next. Taking those first few baby steps one-by-one keeps us motivated long enough for a flow state to emerge.
Once it does, we’re no longer battling with our brain and we’re off to the races. In line with the recent “do less” trend, mastering flow is a great way to do more with less effort — and that’s surely worth a try.
